At a time when Aberdeen is looking at implement a new City Centre Masterplan and looking at ways to connect the city centre more effectively to Aberdeen Beach, is this a time to reconsider my suggestion of a city centre monorail?

Judging by the petitions and demonstrations, it seems that many of Aberdeen’s citizens have a healthy ambition to set high standards when it comes to regenerating our city centre. That is surely a laudable aim.

When Muse Developments and Aviva Investors lodged their detailed plans for Aberdeen’s Marischal Square in May this year it seemed like the developers had won, despite widespread reservations from the public.

Just when it seemed that the plans for a transformation of Aberdeen city centre were about to disappear, along with Sir Ian Wood’s incredibly generous potential donation of £50 million to the scheme, along comes a new plan from Aberdeen architect John Halliday of Halliday Fraser Munro.

Eleven months after Aberdeen City Council administration voted against the Aberdeen City Garden Project, the council’s deputy leader Marie Boulton has suggested winding the clock back and reviving the Peacock arts centre plan for Union Terrace Gardens.

After the sometimes bitter political battles over Aberdeen’s City Garden Project, the initiative by Prof Ferdinand von Prondzynski, principal of the Robert Gordon University, holds out some hope that it could restore a sense of direction for the city.

I have made no secret of my support for the Aberdeen City Garden Project. I saw it as transformational for the city. Something that our forward-thinking forebears (who boldly built the viaduct that is Union Street to create the modern city we know) would have been proud of.

I have an old photograph of Aberdeen in the 19th Century, soon after the Granite City gained that title, following the completion of the huge granite viaduct that carries the grandeur of Union Street across the Denburn Valley.

Along with a substantial proportion of the local population I am dismayed at the threat to vote out the City Garden proposal for Aberdeen city centre, despite the result of a democratic referendum. Read More...

I only discovered last week that the City Garden referendum in Aberdeen has much wider implications than simply the decision between retaining the existing Union Terrace Gardens or creating a new City Garden spanning the Denburn Valley.

If I was going to open a shop, I would start out by doing some pretty intensive market research. I would want to know what people want. I would want to know whether there was space in the market for my business. Read More...